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FhnuZoag writes "Eurogamer has an expose of the shady world of games developers licensing guns. From the article: '"We must be paid a royalty fee — either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales, all negotiable. Typically, a licensee pays between 5 per cent to 10 per cent retail price for the agreement. [...] We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light... Such as the 'good guys' using the rifle," says [Barett Rifles'] Vaughn.'"

Because you'd probably get sued for copyright infringement if you weren't damned careful. This is the bed the "IP" groups made and now we all have to sleep in it, in a world where everything can and is copyrighted it all ends up with somebody getting a check somewhere when you make any damned thing anymore.

this topic makes me curious.
Why do games bother to license the names and images? if I make a movie and want a gun in it, I don't ask permission of the manufacturer, I can even use its real name. Same goes for any real world product that gets used in the movies. How is using it in a game any different?
Of course as hairyfeet points out, there is a lot of new laws on the books that could change all the rules. The obvious answer is that they will sue you, and try their best to make it unprofitable for you.

Actually most of the products you can identify in movies have either had the rights paid for by the movie company or if the movie is a big name flick will often get money from the company in return for showing their product in a favorable light. Why do you think every person that uses a laptop in a movie is always using a MacBook when IRL that is less than 10% of the population? Product placement.

So its not like you haven't been seeing the same thing in hollywood for years, with the smaller movies paying a fee for licensing while the big names get the product for free or even get a check for showing it, its common practice. Watch the horribly bad movie "Jack & Jill" sometime which rumor has it even though it bombed Sandler and pals actually came out ahead thanks to how much product placement was in that movie. they might as well have called it "Jack and Jill, sponsored by *" for all the products from dunkin donuts to Sony electronics you see on the screen. i honestly don't think there is 4 minutes in the whole movie where a logo isn't visible, its THAT obvious.

Exactly these games are all about selling a specific FANTASY about war, in that fantasy everybody is Rambo and nobody is Joe Blow the nameless nobody getting the shit jobs like digging ditches or hauling canned goods, its all fantasy.

And those specific guns play into that fantasy, which is why you see the same damned guns in every game, just as you can't sell a football game in the USA without the NFL because those logos and outfits all play into the armchair quarterback's fantasy of being the big football star.

So on the one hand while I'm no fan of arms dealers and think we've been overboard for many years when it comes to what can and can't be copyrighted on the other hand these companies know EXACTLY what guns to get, they've done countless focus groups and know EXACTLY what the people that play those games want which is why we see the same thing over and over. While I personally find it boring as hell and would rather play something like Borderlands with infinite variation if somebody is willing to pay the money to play with virtual military hardware? Meh whatever floats your boat I guess.

I think gun manufacturers should start licensing some of the guns found in Borderlands 2. I'd love to have a gold plated machine gun with a hubcap wheel for a clip that shoots bullets that electrocutes my enemies. And those handguns that launch rockets, those would be pretty useful.

Realism isn't fun. No real soldier, no matter how well trained, is going to fight his way through hundreds of nazis/terrorists/monsters single-handed and come out alive. Only one of them needs to get in a lucky shot.

This is the conclusion I came to after reading the article. Not only do you save tons on licencing fees or potential legal headaches, but you're also free of the questionable ethics of advertising real firearms in the game.

If you're going to make a game set in WW2, you model real WW2 weapons.

If your game is set anywhere from 1990 to 2050, and you're trying to model real-world combat situations (with varying degrees of accuracy), then you'll have to model real world firearms. Due to the durability of firearms and the essentially mature technology, you could expect current technology and models to be used for decades. Consider the 1911 pistol for example: that's not a just a model number, that's the year it was introduced. It's also the most common handgun used by serious competitors today.

Savvy gamers today just aren't going to buy it if their High Intensity Combat Operative character in the game is deploying with Generic Intermediate Caliber Select Fire Rifle firing the combat tested 5.44x40mm Solid Lead to Ashcanistan to fight the nefarious Ethnically and Ideologically Unidentifiable Terrorist Organization. They want their DEVGRU to drop out of a Lockheed C-130J into Timbuktu carrying a Colt M-4 Carbine with a Trijicon ACOG on top so they can put a 5.56mm NATO round into the tuches of a Al Qaeda splinter group that's trying to destroy a UN World Heritage site. (Licensing fees paid for all those trademarks.)

If you want to make stuff up, you've got to set your story a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or some other equivalent narrative technique to put distance between what the player knows and the game-world contains. You can fake medieval weapons. You can't fake modern fire-arms in present-day settings.

I believe the Resident Evil series uses more generic names (or at least it used to). Goldeneye 007 (N64) is a good example of a game that uses similar-sounding names, such as PP7 instead of PPK. It doesn't really make that much of a difference in 99.9% of the situation.

However, there are people who like their games to be as authentic as possible. Would the Madden series be so popular if the teams were made-up? Would Gran Turismo be popular if it had fake cars? (Okay, it does have some fake cars, but the vast majority are real.) For a game that strives for realism, little details like names and model numbers make a big difference.

Furthermore, I have to object with the assertion that the licensing deals are "shady". It is the same kind of deal as is made with car manufacturers, sports teams, etc. To call it shady is to reveal your political bias.

So there's a copyrighted look, a trademarked name, and a patented design. Players demand real brand-name stuff in their games, so developers deliver by licensing real brand-name stuff in their games. To do this legally means getting a license.

Without the trademarks can you really tell the difference between a COLT AR15 and a Bushmaster or an Olympic Arms? The patents on those designs have surely run out.

As far as I can tell for all but the newest guns the only issue should be trademarks.

It's not that I don't agree, but how is that shady when the game developers are licensing the designs? If anything, that's a problem with the way copyright/trademark/patents work.

I don't really understand this article. Would it be less shady if the game developers just stuck brand names in their games without licenses? Would it be less shady if they were petitioning to the courts that rule the designs can't be copyrighted? Would it be less shady if the license agreements didn't come with a catch on usage? I'm pretty sure Disney wouldn't license Mickey to a game that intends to throw him into a wood chipper and would drop a bomb on Disneyland.

Maybe I'm looking for some deep meaning other than "oh, look, it's just like everything else branded but with guns"

I don't think it is shady. Just a waste of money that could be profit.

I think it is just like everything else branded in games. Smart publishers should be charging the gun makers for the advertising. "You want the bushmaster name in our game you pay us, otherwise we will just go talk to all your competitors".

Exactly, though they don't use that word (well, some of them do, calling the NRA terrorists, I shit you not.) The government uses the term "national security issue", which it seems lately they throw that term on just about everything they don't like.

It's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.

t's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.

You could say that substituting any sort of industry for the weapons industry. And really, do you ever expect games publishers to tell you their budgets for anything? Or to work with an indu

In fact, it is so freakin huge that it makes me doubt the veracity of the story.10% of gross is going to be at least 20% of net. I just don't see anyone thinking that including trademarked gun designs is worth 20% of the profit of a video grame.

Only if you get your information from the media/government complex. If you go talk to real people in person, you'll see that it's only the radical fringe that thinks that way. Trouble is, some of them were savvy enough to take control of the media in the 50's.

The arms manufacturers are actually anything but shady in the article, as they've been transparent about the entire process (the games industry would have looked a lot better in this article if they had acted the same way, rather than acting defensively, although we've no way of knowing exactly what questions they were asked).

This article does a great job pointing out the 'shadiness' of the NRA's about-face in participating in the video games industry, then turning around and declaring it the root of all evil. I think really, what this article demonstrates though if anything, is that the average consumer doesn't stop to think about how every realistic item that appears in media is probably either licensed or promotional.

This article does a great job pointing out the 'shadiness' of the NRA's about-face in participating in the video games industry, then turning around and declaring it the root of all evil.

The NRA does not represent the firearms industry; it represents firearms owners. They're not the "gun lobby", they're the "gun owners' lobby". The NRA therefore has nothing to do with gun manufacturers' licensing of realistic guns for video games. Based on Wayne LaPierre's recent statements, the NRA's leadership is most likely opposed to this practice.

But honestly how could you expect them to act ANY differently when moral watchdog types have been treating them like 50s watchdogs treated rock n' roll for what? 30+ years now? I mean what was one of the FIRST THINGS that the media start harping about when the Sandy Hook shooting happened? "Did Lanza...gasp!...Play...dum dum dum...video games?" I swear I saw articles with that as the fucking headline not 24 hours after the damned shooting!

So I don't blame the video games industry one little bit, they've had wrinkled old farts trying to get them since the days of fricking Night Trap. Remember its not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you, and articles like TFA show that the answer to that is a definite YES they are out to get the video games industry.

So there's a copyrighted look, a trademarked name, and a patented design. Players demand real brand-name stuff in their games, so developers deliver by licensing real brand-name stuff in their games. To do this legally means getting a license.

What's so shady about that?

So, read the actual article.

The article's arguments, for the "TLDR" crowd, amount to this:1. Like the candy cigarettes before them, the depiction of realistic guns--especially with the real names attached--amounts to advertisement towards a target population of young individuals, to influence them to purchase the real thing. They provide some anecdotal evidence that it works. As a personal anecdote, I know that it's worked on me (I own a BB gun that's a model of the USP.50; it was my favorite gun & skin from Counter-strike 1).

2. The "shady" part is that the game companies would, seemingly universally, prefer not to talk publicly about any of this (i.e., that there's any ongoing collaboration, licensing, or even two-way discussion between them and gun manufacturers). This is likely a socially-perceived "negative" topic, and therefore discussing it would likely negatively impact sales by casting their companies in a negative light.

Like candy cigarettes, any advertising of an inherently dangerous/deadly product towards an adolescent target audience probably should be carefully scrutinized, regulated, or eliminated.

Like candy cigarettes, any advertising of an inherently dangerous/deadly product towards an adolescent target audience probably should be carefully scrutinized, regulated, or eliminated.

No, that is incorrect. It is the parent's responsibility to scrutinize, regulate or eliminate undesired advertisements directed towards their children/adolescents (for any reason). It is not the Government's job. Period. Don't like the additional responsibility of being a parent, don't have kids.Also, kids aren't the only target audience of video games (especially of this type).

... because we all know that the best way of protecting children is to keep them in a bubble until they turn 18 and then can do whatever they want, right?

Yes, they'll turn out very well if we don't expose them to any "dangerous information" before then. Don't teach them about guns, or tools, or drugs or sex, or anything that might rock the boat (especially to question authority). They'll be fine to figure out all these things on their own with low information. That's how to be a good parent these days.

Because some on the ultra far left don't like anything to do with guns or violence and try to make anything to do with either look evil/shady/sexist/racist or whatever other PC "bad" words you can affix?

Look I don't care what you believe as long as I'm allowed to believe differently, the classic "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" argument but just because you don't like something doesn't make it "bad" or wrong or evil, that is classic political demonization of those that disagree. i had an argument recently with an ultra lefty who was moaning about the lack of female avatars in modern shooters. I simply said "Take a game like Bulletstorm where I get a "ball buster" achievement for blowing a guy's crotch off. Would you have a problem if there were females in the game and there was a "sex change" achievement for blowing off her tits?"

The answers i got illustrated better than anything how you are NOT allowed to think differently than them because i was just a monster for daring to even suggest that, their answer was NOT to simply not have females in the game as devs do now but to remove the violence against the males which if you are gonna remove the violence in games why the fuck even call them games anymore? Just call them Second Life and let everybody be forced to have tea parties and shit.

At the end of the day I do NOT give a rat's ass about hyper realistic shooters but you know what? I would NEVER EVER say you shouldn't be able to play 'em. if shooting a gun so perfectly modeled that even the bullet drop is accurate to within a tenth of an inch over 1000 yards makes you happy? More power to you and I'm glad somebody will cater to your tastes, boring as i find them. But just because i personally don't care for something doesn't give me the right to demonize anybody that does, but sadly we see that behavior on both the ultra left (anything they consider violent or nationalistic) and on the right (the poor and minorities to a certain degree) but we need to call that shit when it happens and instantly dismiss it as the bullshit that it is. You can have a discussion without demonizing the other side and if the ONLY way you can make your argument is to make the other side "evil" then perhaps the problem isn't the other side but the shakiness of your argument.

I would imagine that this situation exists for games featuring cars, airplanes, or any other product that has a corporate brand identity. But a headline decrying "Video Games Fund the Automotive Industry" just doesn't have any punch.

A large proportion of people oppose these companies, and would not like to think that their money is going to them, and were consuming intentional propaganda to glorify their products. I'm a FPS gamer, and I for one would reconsider purchasing future modern warfare style games given this fact.

Maybe it's not your case, but some people do care if the money they spend on a videogame ultimately goes to industries like the Arms Industry. It is perfectly valid, as a customer, to refuse to spend money on games that, due to copyright, end up supporting an industry they loathe (I may like playing a virtual FPS, but loathe an industry that makes money by putting guns in the hands of African children so they kill each other).

Yeah, but how far does that go? I don't want my money to go to a company that supports DRM, so that's easy. I also don't want my money going to Oracle. Does it make sense to not buy a game because the company that published it might have an ancillary backend database for something tangentially related? I don't want my money going to nuclear weapons, but the companies pay taxes to the government which, in part, helps fund the stockpile. I don't want my money going to child prostitutes but who knows what any

That they're licensing a company's depictions of a legal product? Can you explain how this would be different than licensing cars, planes, soft drinks, sports teams, comic book characters or anything else that goes into a video game? What exactly is new about this story that isn't already well known?

This article is pure flamebait. Slashdot should be better than this, but I guess the website traffic must be trending down.

TBH, I'm surprised they charge licensing fees, at least for established game series. I would have suspected it operated more on an under-the-table product placement basis, ie the CEO gets a free rifle, the dev team gets some T-shirts, and the manufacturer gets their new gun front and center in the next CoD game's "big damn heroes" moment.

Oh c'mon! If Jessie Ventura can rip a 20mm chain gun off a Huey and walking fire it then surely Joe average can just pick up a 50cal and fire it like a 30-06! I mean when was the last time you watched an action movie?

Yes. A relative of mine works for a company that wanted to do a racing sim and they eventually gave up because of the nightmare that was trying to get permission to use real cars like Porsche or Corvette.

I seem to recall a rumour that they got rid of the damage in the Need For Speed series because the can manufacturers didn't like seeing their cars dented up and performing poorly after a crash. I haven't played the games recently, but the last one I played and liked was NFS IV, because it had real damage, and you didn't have the computer cars sideswiping you to run you off the track, because their car would get damaged as well. It was really fun to play a racing game where you would almost garaunteed end

"We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light"

I agree with the above posters that licensing the right to use a the title is a fair practice. What is not fair is the restrictions placed on how the item can be used in the game. You are licensing the right to use the name of a real world weapon, and end up signing away the rights of how a gun can be used and who could use them in a game. How is that a fair depiction of the real world? It's like payi

Van Halen used to have a clause in their performance contracts that they must be provided with a bowl of MM's with the brown ones picked out. What does 'fairness' have to do with a legal civil contract?

The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with). As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography: Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . .." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

After reading the article it seems the gun manufacturers should pay the game companies for advertising if the developer shows the gun in a good light. Based on the article gun sales can be significantly higher when they are featured in a game.

The use of real items in a fictional context is a very gray area in Law. The idea that any manufactured item requires a license when it appears in a film, book or game is plainly a nonsense. Consider an urban scene in a movie. Within seconds, tens of thousands of manufactured items are visible, each with a product name and a company that produced them. Do you REALLY think the fact that these items are onscreen requires the produces to seek permission, or gain licenses?

"We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light... Such as the 'good guys' using the rifle,"

Bushmaster's parent company, Cerberus Capital, has decided to divest itself [cnn.com] of Bushmaster and the other arms companies under the Freedom Group umbrella. This was ostensibly done in response to the Newtown shooting, i.e. on account the illegal actions undertaken by a deranged boy, and not even one of their customers, with the use of one of their products. Certain segments of the public blame the company itself.

Imagine for a moment that the same company had knowingly allowed its products to be used in video games for nefarious purposes. Imagine the game was like Carmageddon from the nineties and you could get extra points for shooting hookers. Or, more likely, you could use the gun when acting as terrorists in some C-Strike like bombing scenario. And then that same gun with the same brand was used in real life to do harm to innocents. What would the repercussions be then? Some will say that the requirement the gun only be used by the 'good guys' is PR or propaganda, and they're partly right. But there's another side to this. A company who can be blamed for the misuse of its products has to try all the harder to defend itself and its image from association with that misuse.

Gun runners? Are you implying that companies like Colt, FN, and Barrett are smuggling illicit firearms to drug cartels and African warlords? They sell almost exclusively to the US government...which is far worse.

So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?

Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.

Oh, I don't know. Somehow the FBI can figure out how to catch a terrorist who wants to bomb a building without letting them actually build a working bomb. Yet the ATF couldn't figure out how to catch an illegal buyer without actually letting them get a working weapon?

Oh please! Call it what it was, which several agents even called it, a "false flag operation" to try to build a connection where none existed of American guns going to Mexican dope dealers so they could try to push tougher gun laws HERE.

And its not even the first time the US government has been busted pulling a false flag, 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died thanks to the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident, and just like in this case the full details won't be learned until the principals involved are long dead and can't be prosecuted, then the MSM will just do a "Oh BTW" and then act like we should just pretend it never happened, just like Vietnam.

The simple fact is Mexican dope dealers can just trade their dope to any of the Bumfuckistan former Warsaw Pact countries and get all the Soviet era fully auto weapons they want, including grenades and rocket launchers and even a fricking sub if they want one, they don't need American semi auto anything which is why they had to cook up "Fast & Furious" because the data they were finding showed the vast majority were carrying AK47s, just like every other guerrilla force on the planet NOT American guns.

THIS is why they should be rotting in jail, THIS is why we need a full investigation, not because somebody fucked up and people got killed but because you have the US government running a false flag op on its own people to try to manipulate them into going along with the political plans of the ones pulling the op.

As long as we're whipping out anecdotes as evidence, I've played lots of gun games but I didn't actually get interested in the real life versions at all until I was invited to shoot trap.

I think that positive light angle is probably overblown. I mean, it's not like the bad guys aren't also armed, or that the game will keep you from dying because you're holding a magic Colt branded M4, or the game prevents you from shooting unarmed civilians while equipping a Remington but will let you do it if you equip a B